Land use, land cover, and climate change across the Mississippi basin: Impacts on selected land and water resources

Abstract

The Mississippi Basin is the third largest drainage basin in the world and is home to one of the most productive agricultural regions on Earth. Here we discuss how land use/land cover change and climatic variability may be affecting some key environmental processes across the Mississippi and how these, in turn, affect the flow of selected ecosystem goods and services in the region. Specifically, we consider the recent history of land use/land cover change, crop yields, basin river flow and hydrology, and large-scale water quality in the Mississippi Basin. We find that agricultural activities may have had a profound influence on the basin and may have shifted the flow of many ecosystem goods and services into agricultural commodities, at the expense of altering many of the important biogeochemical linkages between atmosphere, land, and water.